Trinity Heights Church Podcast Trinity Heights Church

When Jesus is warned that Herod wants to kill him, he says, ‘Oh Jerusalem Jerusalem you who stone the prophets and kill those sent to you.’ Jesus recognizes that Herod is the most recent iteration of a long history of Israel’s leaders defending themselves from people like him in order to maintain the status quo.Matthew’s gospel tells us that Herod had all the baby boys in Bethlehem two and under put to death. Mark and Luke tell similar gruesome stories about Herod. George Orwell says: ‘In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible’, and Herod was the indefensible status quo of Israel. When faced with a choice between Herod or Jesus, Israel’s leaders went with Herod. They had to narrate their reality so that they could make peace with the decision.Because language is used to defend the indefensible, Orwell explains that our ‘political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.'Joe Biden was the chair of the special senate committee for foreign relations from 1997 to 2003. During his tenure, Biden began to advocate for the invasion of Iraq 5 years before George Bush executed the war. After Bush waged a war of aggression, Obama became president and smoothed it all over. By that time Obama felt he could drop the euphemistic language and said ‘we tortured some folks’. He went on to explain, ‘While I don’t believe that anybody is above the law, I also believe that we need to look forward instead of backwards’. Obama instructed America to put the illegal war and the torture program down the ‘memory hole’ - another Orwellian term. Obama himself would go on to start new wars, renew the patriot act, and arrest more journalists and their sources than any president to date.     If the church is going to have a prophetic imagination, we have to be willing to break with the herd and refuse to speak the political language handed to us by the predominant culture. This may not mean success for the church in the sense of convincing others to see what we see; but the church is not called to be successful, but rather to be faithful.
 
Follow us on socials!
Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok: @trinityheightschurch
 
#trinityheights #nycchurch #nycfaith #nyccommunity #nycgospel #churchinnyc #nycchristian #nycbelievers #nycworship #nycinspiration #newyorkcity #nyc

The prophet’s ability to predict events decades if not centuries into the future can seem mysterious and appear as if they have psychic powers or a crystal ball. But when we read Jesus’ words closely - and the words of other prophetic voices - we discover that Jesus and other prophets understood how their time and place was really functioning - regardless of how others said it was functioning. In other words the prophets had a far more intimate knowledge of their own contemporary situation than anyone else around them and it is this deep understanding of their contemporary situation that gives them such predictive powers. But this too is mysterious - why do the prophets understand their contemporary situation more deeply than the people around them? We can explore this mystery by considering the question that Jesus often asks his listeners ‘Have you not read?’      Given that the vast majority of people were illiterate in Jesus day this may seem like an odd question to ask. It seems the obvious answer is ‘no of course they haven’t read, because they can’t read or write!’But when Jesus asks this question he is addressing the literate Pharisees and the educated Sadducees and the cultured Herodians; in other words, Jesus’ sharpest confrontations are with the educated cultured class.And every time Jesus asks the question ‘have you not read?’, followed by a well-known passage of scripture, he is showing these self appointed guardians of Israel that they do not really know these scriptures in any meaningful way and are in fact at odds with their own texts.They had co-opted the language of scripture to tell the story in such a way that essentially pushed God out of the way and allowed them to seize control and maintain their own power. By asking have you not read, Jesus wanted to rescue them as he want to rescue us from a self-serving language that leads us astray and disconnects us from the realities of our own contemporary situation.
Follow us on socials!
Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok: @trinityheightschurch
 
#trinityheights #nycchurch #nycfaith #nyccommunity #nycgospel #churchinnyc #nycchristian #nycbelievers #nycworship #nycinspiration #newyorkcity #nyc

During a TV interview, British comedian and outspoken atheist, Stephen Fry, was asked, “What would you do if you died and found out God existed?” Fry responded that he would walk up to God and say, "Bone cancer in children. What’s that about? How dare you create a world where there is so much misery that is not our fault. It’s evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?"Stephen Fry isn’t wrong when he says that our world is full of injustice and pain. Jeremiah and the Psalms are filled with obvious anger and frustration directed at God, “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician? Why has the health of the daughter of my people not been restored?"The same feelings of resentment and rage that Stephen Fry directs towards God are in fact echoed with as much vitriol and despair within the Bible itself. Pastor Stephen once said, “The problem of evil and suffering in the world is as much a philosophical problem for Christians as it is for everyone. The question of innocent suffering before a good, all-powerful God is the engine that drives the entire biblical narrative. It’s in multiple psalms, every verse of the book of Job, in the cry of Jesus on the cross. The Bible creates space for and provides us language to bring our complaints against God.”The Biblical narrative itself is designed to hand us the language of lament in times when our own words fail us and when all we have is a wordless groan.In response to the Prosperity Gospel in American Christianity, Kate Bowler (professor of American Religious History at Duke who was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer at the age of 35) says, “We don’t serve a Quid Pro Quo God. Our lives are built with such delicate material; it doesn’t take a lot to topple the whole thing over... our culture makes us feel embarrassed for the terrible things that happen to us. It makes us feel ashamed, lonely and like a loser. I would love if we had a culture that could embrace those of us that fall... give us a language and support to help us feel like we’re not problems to be solved, we’re just people to be loved.”
 
Follow us on socials!
Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok: @trinityheightschurch
 
#trinityheights #nycchurch #nycfaith #nyccommunity #nycgospel #churchinnyc #nycchristian #nycbelievers #nycworship #nycinspiration #newyorkcity #nyc

The prophet Jeremiah witnessed the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of Solomon’s Temple at the hands of Babylon. Even after being allowed to remain with his people in Judah instead of being taken to Babylon, he had to flee to Egypt where he eventually died, never having returned home.A tragic sequence of events for a prophet of Israel who understood full well that the very prophetic tradition of which he was a part had started back with Moses and the Exodus out of Egypt. For Jeremiah, to be stuck back in Egypt would have felt like a cruel joke.If you open the book of Jeremiah and jab your finger down on any given line of text you’re more than likely to find gut-wrenching grief, lament and gruesome descriptions of human mortality/death. But why focus on death and dying?Lydia Dugdale is the director of The Center for Medical Ethics at Columbia University, having first established The Program for Medicine, Spirituality, and Religion at Yale School of Medicine, and is also the author of a book, "The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom."Lydia is an exemplar of what it means to actively practice hope, AND look into the darkness and explore human mortality and what she calls, "The Good Death". She is adamant that working to form a healthy concept of "The Good Death" is what informs our ability to live "The Good Life."Lydia says that she wishes everyone, regardless of youth or health, might internalize the fact that they have a death diagnosis.People are given 3-6 months to live, and all of a sudden feelings of jealousy, attachment to material possessions, the pursuit of success, all begin to subside; all the ‘Imperial Consciousness' stuff falls away and what remains is The Prophetic Imagination - the hope for a mended world, longing for resurrection and understanding that time is precious and people matter.Like Lydia, Jeremiah wasn’t gazing into the darkness from a place of overwhelming despair but rather from a place of hope. Through his art, Jeremiah points us towards the fragile beauty of life, mines our universal longings for resurrection, and unearths what often feel like our absurd hopes for a restored, mended world.
 
Follow us on socials!
Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok: @trinityheightschurch
 
#trinityheights #nycchurch #nycfaith #nyccommunity #nycgospel #churchinnyc #nycchristian #nycbelievers #nycworship #nycinspiration #newyorkcity #nyc

We are inundated by messages that say that “hopeful” or promising language is too much, too idealistic for this world.The prevailing wisdom tells us repeatedly, this world is a violent world that needs violent solutions. We are confronted by the “facts” and we clam up. “Hope... is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts... hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question.” - Walter BrueggemannProphetic Hope is not optimism.Optimism is somehow managing the reality and massaging the facts and attempting to create reasons for positivity. It’s fatuous.HOPE however isn’t afraid to look into the darkness. Christian hope, rooted in ancient traditions reaching back to the Hebrew Bible, connects us into a perspective, a posture which is one of hope, in the middle of darkness.Texts such as Isaiah 25:6-9 and the stories about banquets and weddings told by Jesus in Matthew 25:1-13 are energizing us to defy the darkness. In Jesus’ story he insists hope is an active work to be done through the night, keeping our lamps fueled even if the wait seems interminably long.Jesus will come, at the midnight hour, and we will see a new world comprised of all the tens of thousands of gestures of justice, sacrifice, grace and love, with all the compassionate and loyal movements rolled up into a new world where there is only beauty.No more tears, only beauty, only love and no more death… all that has been beautiful, all that has contained love (however imperfectly we enacted it) will be preserved and brought forward to this new world. The great mending. The great reversal.
 
Follow us on socials!
Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok: @trinityheightschurch
 
#trinityheights #nycchurch #nycfaith #nyccommunity #nycgospel #churchinnyc #nycchristian #nycbelievers #nycworship #nycinspiration #newyorkcity #nyc

We often get the impression that the prophet operated as a lone voice over and against the rest of society. This idea is reinforced when we flick through the prophetic books of the bible and find that they are all named after particular prophets: Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Jeremiah etc.Certainly, there were times when the prophets felt alone. Remember Elijah sitting by himself, wishing for his own death, claiming that he was the only faithful prophet left?But even then, Elijah was not alone, because Obediah had hidden 100 prophets in caves and supplied them with bread and water.Or take Moses for example, when God commands him to go to Pharaoh he replies, ‘I’m not eloquent, I am slow in speech and of tongue’. And so God brings his brother Aaron to him so that they can fulfill the prophetic calling - not alone but together.Before they confront Pharaoh, they go to Israel, gather the elders, and begin to cultivate the prophetic imagination in them asking, ‘do you remember when things were different? Can you imagine a different future?’ In other words, the prophets belonged to prophetic communities in which their own prophetic imaginations could be cultivated.For as long as there have been prophets, there have been those who ape the prophetic voice. Last episode we compared the prophets of Baal who ate from Jezebel’s table with the prophets of God who were surviving on rations of bread and water hiding in a cave. The prophets around Jezebel’s table knew what to say and what not to say if they were going to survive and they had no interest in delivering a word from ‘beyond’.This culture of fear and coerced agreement contrasts with the culture of love which Jesus cultivates amongst his disciples. Jesus says ‘Love one another as I have loved you.’ If we love each other the way Christ loves us then we know we will be there for each other no matter what. This kind of love produces freedom to be honest and this honesty and love are the wellspring of the prophetic imagination.       
 
Follow us on socials!
Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok: @trinityheightschurch
 
#trinityheights #nycchurch #nycfaith #nyccommunity #nycgospel #churchinnyc #nycchristian #nycbelievers #nycworship #nycinspiration #newyorkcity #nyc